LONDONFIELDWORKS

JOURNALISM

KITES - SYZYGY REVIEW by Oliver Bennett

image: Oliver Bennett at Macrahanish airstrip
photo by Anthony Oliver, 1999

As the light aircraft circled around and we looked down at the two six-foot rokaku lifting kites - brigh white specks against the emerald green of a small Scottish island - I pondered that this, not statues on plinths in Trafalgar Square or messages of municipal pride in new town plazas, might well prove to be the future of public art. Some 1000 feet below the Cessna was a team of artists conducting an experimental artwork that involved transmitting weather data from sensors on the kites via the Internet to a sculpture-cum-receiver at the ICA in London.

I was at the maiden voyage of Syzygy, an art and technology extravaganza that has taken three years to achieve. Indeed, it takes almost that long to explain. For this is not a 'high concept' project, as Hollywood calls the ten-word summary of a movie pitch, but one that poses more questions than it answers. Syzygy (the name refers to an astrological phenomemon when planets align) has corralled some of the finest minds from scientific bodies such as the Imperial College and the National Nuclear Corporation, and has the support of the Arts Council and the Millennium Commission as part of a brief to 'encourage people's understanding of science', and help to converge the two cultures. One is impressed with its sheer scale and elegance of its execution; one is also left groping for a meaning, a narrative, a bit of closure. But maybe that will strike later in a post-script Eureka. It is the product of artists Bruce Gilchrist and Jo Joelson, who corralled a team of twelve people, dubbed this band Combo, and took them to a remote location to stage the first proper flight of this 'nomadic sculpture'.

Joelson had a contact who suggested Sanda - an uninhabited island off the coast of Western Scotland - and up went the two artists accompanied by a fully-fledged 'arts lab'-style back-up: one 'techie', one composer, three kite flyers (part of a team called AirKraft) and four writers. I found myself up in the air as I was flown over the Mull of Kintyre, the windswept muse for PaulMcCartney's infamous shanty,to observe Syzygy at work in Sanda two miles over the sea. "The location is important but not crucial," said Gilchrist after the event, string burns from the kites fresh on his wrist. "The idea is that Syzygy can work anywhere (wind permitting)." Indeed, Syzygy can travel like a performance or a band and has since been at the Total Eclipse festival at Devon. In the event it turned out that Sanda's sense of place quickly exerted itself; particularly as it had a colourful past, having once been owned by the bass player of rock band Cream, Jack Bruce, and was now owned by a bohemian laird called Dick Lanyon who wishes to promote it as a holiday retreat. One reaches it from the mainland Kintyre, a strange, atmospheric place on which is a huge airstrip, custom-built for the Cold War, now barely used and incongrous amidst a rural district of fields and farmsteads. It is a fairly bleak environment: the nearest large settlement, Campbeltown, is a hard-nosed whisky and herring community where the pubs have no windows.

The airstrip would once have been a useful and remote site for NATO military and intelligence hardware to gather on Airstrip One, as the UK was once (and probably remains) known by US forces; and the area therefore no stranger to radio waves carrying information back to the state power centres. A decade or so prior to Syzygy's meteorological messages to the ICA, the north Atlantic security codes would have crackled across the gorse and between the buzzards that patrol the land. As this need had dwindled post the Cold War, the airstrip now handled one scheduled flight a week, supplemented only by the odd neo-laird such as McCartney using it to land charter flights. But despite the lack of traffic the kite flyers, from a team called AirKraft, still had to observe the legal necessity of calling the Civil Aviation Authority before flying above 200 feet (they flew as high as 1000 feet). In the small plane, the contact was made with the underemployed air traffic controller, whose reassuring stream of 'alphas' and 'bravos' joined the airborne data from Syzygy's kites. Up there, the sudden multiple shifts of the weather, so well-known to walkers in the Scottish glens, was evident in 360 degrees - despite the brilliant sun the possibility of sudden change loomed in the presence of dark clouds on one flank and the disorienating parabolic shimmer of the sea-sky horizon.

Artistically it might be useful to think of Syzygy as grandiose, gestural: like Christo's island wrappings perhaps; or more importantly the large-scale semi-mystical tradition of the 'land art' of Walter de la Maria (whose Lightning Field also incorporates the weather into its fabric) and Robert Smithson, both of whose work is seen in documentation rather than in reality. There is also a hint of technologically-obsessed artists like the Australian Stelarc, who wires his body up and becomes himself the receiver of signals.

What of Syzygy's audience? Apart from myself and a couple of other small planes above Kintyre, no members of the public could actually see the kite-flying at remote uninhabited Sanda, except on Internet bulletins linked to the Syzygy website. But then, watching kites was not the point; and this was a transmission station for the real guts of the artwork. Atop one of the kites, and on the body of one flyer, were small sensors that picked up meteorological and neurophysiological data, making a record of the weather and by EEG, the flyer's emotions. On the ground by the flyers, was a 'field station' - a dome-like structure, vaguely reminiscent of Buckminster Fuller's Geodesic Dome - provided by design group Inflate. From this tent-like 'Mission Control' on Sanda the data was transmitted by mobile telephone to the Internet and then to the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, where a sculpture composed of intelligent materials - a TV set-sized object dangling from the ceiling on which LED lights flashed, 'smart' glass misted over and liquid bubbled according to the meteorological messages it received. This was the interpretive device; the visual representation of the Sanda weather.

The Syzygy website makes much of its technological and cultural antecedents and cites the work as "referencing Faraday, Cody, Marconi" - indeed, the project brings to mind Benjamin Franklin's keys on a kite that we enjoyed as schoolchildren learning about electricity. That said, the blinking 'smart' sculpture at the ICA end tended also to evoke Dr Who, Blake Seven and the Krypton Factor - which shows, if nothing else, that popular sci-fi has had singular impact on how we view the imagery of technology. Indeed, as the sparkly pendant dangled from the ceiling, it seemed to harbour the very emotional crux of new technology - the glamour of progress offset by the fear of sentient machinery. But the Syzygy technology harnessed the scientific community for the more optimistic purpose of finding new and enlightened ways to link art and technology. It also used the Internet in a significant manner, not merely a means to publish artworks electronically but as a constituent part of the artwork itself; as if a synapse in the global brain that is the world-wide web. Yet if one is expecting some grand symbolism from this kite-gallery link-up - and one fancies that somewhere buried is a metaphor of expanded consciousness - one may be let down. Indeed, at times the artwork is as unrevealing and opaque as the reactolite-style 'smart' glass in misty mode - although underpinning the project is an analogy between weather and the human mind. "Both the mind and weather are complex and under-researched," says Gilchrist. "They mirror each other." Indeed, as we tend to use meteorological metaphors for moods, mental processes and personalities - 'sunny' dispositions, 'brainstorms' and 'tempestuous' natures alike - this may be more than a whimsical analogy.